Obama Derides Humanities Majors

Obama says he pursued humanities after he 'misspent' high school

Earlier this year, Obama belittled art history, depicting it as a penniless career—which, as critics later pointed out, is not even remotely true. Obama was then shamed into sending a handwritten apology to an outraged art history professor.

On Tuesday, Obama took another shot at liberal arts students, suggesting that he only majored in humanities because he “misspent” his high school years.

During a Q&A hosted by Tumblr, one user asked Obama how America could “promote growth in STEM fields without putting humanities on the back burner.”

“First of all,” Obama began, “I want to say, I was a humanities major. So I majored in political science and minored in English.”

But according to Obama, those majors blossomed from a desire to slack off during high school. “I actually loved math and science until I got into high school,” he reminisced, “and then I misspent those years. And the thing about the humanities was, you could kind of talk your way through classes, which you couldn’t do in math and science, right?”

Once he was done joking about how Plato and Aristotle are for slackers, Obama rushed to reassure viewers: “A great liberal arts, humanities education is still critically important” in order to learn to “work with people and communicate clearly and effectively.”